ReBoot: The Ride
ReBoot: The Ride was the first of two IMAX Ridefilms based on the CGI world of ReBoot. The first simulation, opened at Sega City@Playdium (now simply called Playdium) in Mississauga, Ontario on October 17, 1997. Viewers sit in an 18-passenger vehicle mounted on an orthogonal motion base. The film is projected at forty-eight frames per second onto a fourteen-foot 180° spherically curved screen. The ride played at the Circus Circus in the Adventure Dome in Las Vegas and then later was moved down the strip to The Luxor, where it ran up until 2007. The second featurette produced in the fall of that year, was named ' "ReBoot: The Ride V2: Journey Into Chaos" '. This was subsequently opened at Playdium in Burnaby, British Columbia and ran for a brief time. Both Ridefilms were available at Moody Gardens in Galveston, Texas early in their release. Ride Plot Before the IMAX ride commences a two-minute introductory clip previews the prologue to those queuing: Maxine is giving a demonstration to the audience. She explains her function to find Systems and capabilities, which boasts smart-search boosters reading the passenger's own thoughts to find their optimum desired destination, making her the most advanced Search Engine available on the Net. The camera pans out revealing Megabyte is actually watching this promotional reel within his Silicon Tor; he knows about Maxine! The promise of "unlimited power" is too much for the inescapably greedy virus to ignore. He instructs Herr Doktor to prepare the recently constructed tractor beam, Megabyte intends to claim the Search Engine's technology for himself and with it, infect the entire Net. The megalomania virus is so busy scheming Herr Doktor has to warn him about the Guardian Bob. Megabyte on the other hand observes his patrolling ABCs defending the Tor and is confident they'll keep them both occupied. He orders his chief scientist and Bunnyfoot to activate the tractor beam immediately which will ensnare the browsing Maxine. Megabyte assures himself there'll be no mistakes in his diabolical plan; he will soon have total Net domination. Now the immersive 3D featurette plays out from the perspective of the Net-travelling passengers aboard Maxine's craft: Maxine asks the audience where they'd like to go, when suddenly a green beam hits the shuttle, erasing the current URL and replacing it with Mainframe's own domain name. The Search Engine struggles against this tractor beam, but cannot stop everyone from being pulled into the infected system's portal. They materialize inside Tor where Maxine detects a virus. Megabyte is standing before them, greeting in a platitude manner, before summoning Hack and Slash. The dim-witted robots grab either side of the craft, having a brief tug-of-war. Without warning the virals are interrupted by weapons fire, blowing the duo away. Bob appears on a Zip Board armed with a large plasma cannon; both Guardian and Search Engine recognize each other, however there is no time for friendly chitchat as Bob quickly protects Maxine from the advancing virals. Bob explains Megabyte is after her own drive unit and she must flee; he fires upon the ABC army. Maxine motions the craft away from the Tor while the furious virus below orders his fleet to ignore the Guardian and apprehend the escaping-Maxine at once. Maxine nosedives the craft straight into the bowels of Giedi Prime's industrial sector, taking on huge fire from the legions of ABCs. Seeking shelter in the smelting plant below, Maxine instructs to audience to keep calm while powering down her engine, hoping to evade the hunting-viral forces. Using stealth she slips through their ranks until one unit with a search light spots her. The Search Engine is soon cornered and surrounded by them. The ABC commander gives the fugitive an ultimatum: release her encryption drive unit or be destroyed. Bob flies straight onto scene just in time, as Glitch morphs into a large portal. He tells everyone to enter the cogwheel, where Glitch transports them straight to Dot Matrix's location in Kits Sector. Miss Matrix motions the Search Engine to follow her. A large motorbike is flying alongside Maxine, it is Megabyte; he uses his razor sharp claws to cut the craft's body in half, detaching the engine from the passenger's section, the latter comes crashing down onto a building's roof. A party function atop scrambles to avoid them. The rear propelled by momentum slides down the structure's slope straight into another apartment in Kits. They hurtle into a hallway, knocking an innocent Binome down a flight of stairs before following behind. Still moving body slams into a door past the Small Town Binomes, right onto Mouse's room. The quick-thinking hacker leaps out of the craft's path as it crashes through a series of walls. The hub exits the building along with Mike the TV, finding himself stuck to the Search Engine before falling off. Megabyte holding Maxine's offline engine is seen flying on his Motorbike smashing past a large screen television that the audience fall through. The rear slams onto the busy Baudway Sector streets to an abrupt stop. Bob, Dot and Mike in the 262 rescue the passengers by hooking an energy tow cable onto them. With no tension on this long cable the heavy craft skids awkwardly under the data highway, then rams Bob's car by a T-Junction nearly knocking Mike off his back seat. They all follow Megabyte in hot pursuit. The evil virus' bike is simply too fast and manoeuvrable though, as the heroes end up going through the bristling Baudway mall instead. Emerging from a Toy store onto the streets again, they accidentally fly straight into Dot's Diner sign. Avoiding heavy traffic the rear of the craft approaches a sharp turn much too quickly and the cable is pulled taunt round a series of stone pillars next to a glass monument. Megabyte flying past them smirks triumphantly as they've reached the end. However, the elastic cable slingshots the craft round the structure, taking out Megabyte's Bike in a fiery explosion. Bob scampers to repair Maxine with Glitch while Dot reattaches the module; the grateful Search Engine regains consciousness and thanks the Guardian before achieving altitude once more. She flies up to the Principal Office, ready to leave Mainframe. A sudden jolt rocks the whole craft as Megabyte has stowed-away on it, determined to recapture the engine. Maxine now fights back and swerves the vessel in mid-air, causing the virus to loose his balance and fall off. They fly into the Sub-Sphere's Portal Generator back onto the Net; a slightly flustered Maxine recomposes herself and thanks everyone for participating in her demonstration, hoping to see them again soon. IMAX Corporation IMAX (short for Image Maximum) is a film format created by Canada's IMAX Corporation that has the capacity to display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film display systems available at the time. A standard IMAX screen is 22 m wide and 16.1 m high (72.6 ft x 52.8 ft), but can be larger. Currently, IMAX is the most widely used system for large-format, special-venue film presentations. IMAX Corporation ("IMAX"), a publicly traded company founded in 1967, headquartered jointly in New York City and Toronto, Canada, is one of the world's leading entertainment technology companies, with particular emphasis on film and digital imaging technologies including 3D, post-production and digital projection. IMAX is a fully-integrated, out-of-home entertainment enterprise with activities ranging from the design, leasing, marketing, maintenance, and operation of IMAX® theatre systems to film development, production, post-production and distribution of large-format films. IMAX also designs and manufactures cameras, projectors and consistently commits significant funding to ongoing research and development. The IMAX theatre network currently consists of more than 295 IMAX theatres in 40 countries. Approximately 60 percent of the theatres are located in North America, while the remaining 40 percent are spread internationally. Roughly half of the theatres are part of commercial theatre complexes. The rest are located in institutional venues, such as museums and science centres. More than half of the IMAX theatre network is equipped with IMAX 3D technology. To date, almost a billion people have enjoyed The IMAX Experience® at specially designed theatres around the world. IMAX Corporation & Mainframe Entertainment Inc Imax Corporation and Mainframe Entertainment, already syndicating ReBoot's third season across TV networks, joined forces to produce a pair of Ridefilm exclusively for IMAX® Ridefilm™ simulators. Working with IMAX Corporation's immersion, Mainframe Inc now had the rare opportunity to take the CGI motion animation in the cyber world of System Mainframe to its highest level of detail and realism ever. Produced by Christopher Brough, Ian Pearson and Hart Getzen, the latter two who also collaborated the ride's storyline together; ReBoot: The Ride was directed by Scott Speirs. Animators from the show returned including Andrew Grant, Ken Henderson, Ken Steel, Keith Arima, George Samilski, Jim Perkins and Deryk Tappin to begin modeling and developing the featurette, wanted the metropolis that is Mainframe to resemble how Los Angeles was depicted in Ridley Scott's epic "Blade Runner". Ken Ball and Steve Sauers oversaw the technical implementation while Bob Buckley composed the music throughout. All had worked on the studio's all-CG TV series "ReBoot," up to senior animators; Spiers had even been directing all the video sequences for ReBoot: The Game. But nothing prepared them for the experience of creating an immersive Imax ridefilm based on the series. In the process of completing a "ReBoot" ridefilm they needed to satisfy audiences by making them experience more of the TV series' thrills by placing them inside Mainframe itself. The animators at Canada's Mainframe Entertainment were able to take advantage of the large library of characters they've created over the show's current three seasons; they still had to build 15 entirely new environments for the four-and-a-half-minute ridefilm. The challenges of expanding small-screen technology into something immersive and more real-looking were legion. First, the ridefilm is formatted entirely differently from the TV series. A full 180-degree surround output onto 35mm Vistavision film and projected onto a curved 14-foot screen, which meant the animators could only experience their animation as it would appear by looking through a fisheye lens. The images had to have 2,000 lines of resolution and runs at 48 frames per second, which is double the number of frames, so it quickly became bigger than a half-hour episode, making it an intense amount of work. ReBoot staffers had to be in very close communication with Imax employees because every camera move we made had to translate into the motion base. Everyone had to be careful that the motion was very effective, whilst not doing something that would either leave the audience shaken, disorientated or nauseous. References *Mainframe Entertainment used the ReBoot third season design for Dot Matrix, while keeping Bob's original appearance from Seasons one and two. *Maxine, the Search Engine, makes her debut on ReBoot in The Episode With No Name. *In ReBoot, IMAX is the name of Maxine's ship. *A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is shown on Maxine's monitor. *The Small Town Binomes a parody of "The Village People" from Talent Night make a cameo. *In Kits Sector a huge television screen features the unnamed female Sprite seen in The Medusa Bug. *Downtown Baudway with all the advertising banners resembles New York's Time Square. *On Level One in Baudway Sector a huge statue of Bob fighting Gigabyte can be seen. *Among the system portals in the Net, a flying teapot was also visible. External Links *IMAX from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia *IMAX CORPORATION *IMAX® Ridefilm™ - ReBoot: The Ride at Slack & Hash's Domain Category:Media